Can you rebuild history? One year after fire destroyed priceless artifacts at the Gold Nugget Museum, tenacious historians seek to restore town's past

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PARADISE, CA – NOV. 6: Don Criswell, president of the Gold Nugget Museum Board of Directors, stands at the gates of the destroyed museum lost in last year’s Camp Fire, in Paradise, Calif., Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2019. The museum has reopened temporarily in the nearby Paradise train depot as it looks to rebuild. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)

PARADISE, CA – NOV. 6: Bill Hartley, vice president of the Gold Nugget Museum, and his wife Pam, stand inside the museum’s new home, a former transmission shop in Paradise, Calif., Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2019. The old museum was destroyed by the Camp Fire last December, and volunteers are planning to rebuild. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)

PARADISE, CA – NOV. 6: Don Criswell, president of the Gold Nugget Museum Board of Directors, and Michelle Radar look at a period dress donated to the museum, Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2019, in Paradise, Calif. The old museum and most of its exhibits were lost in last year’s Camp Fire. The museum has reopened temporarily in the nearby Paradise train depot as it looks to rebuild. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)

PARADISE, CALIFORNIA – NOVEMBER 23: The gates to the Gold Nugget Museum remain locked, Friday, Nov. 23, 2018, more than two weeks after the town of Paradise, Calif. was destroyed by the Camp Fire. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)

PARADISE, CA – June 24: A deer saunters past the float for Miss Gold Nugget that was salvaged from last November’s deadly Camp Fire and now sits in a field in downtown Paradise, Calif., Monday, June 25, 2019. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)

PARADISE, CALIFORNIA – DECEMBER 11: Charred typewriters sag on buckled shelves at the Gold Nugget Museum in Paradise, Calif., Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2018, more than a month after being destroyed by the Camp Fire. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)

PARADISE, CALIFORNIA – NOVEMBER 23: A burro statue stands guard over the destroyed Gold Nugget Museum, in Paradise, Calif., Friday, Nov. 23, 2018, 15 days after the town was destroyed in the Camp Fire. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)

PARADISE — The beloved Gold Nugget Museum lost almost everything in last year’s Camp Fire. Gone are antique guns and mining certificates, military uniforms and a baptismal gown. Native American baskets and a 1909 auto, hundreds of heirloom dolls and thousands of historic photos were consumed. The flames even melted the plaster replica of the famed 54-pound nugget that birthed this town.

This is what it gained: dozens of small white crosses, memorializing the fire’s dead. And a vision to re-build the heart of a place that almost vanished.

“Everything’s changed,” said museum president Don Criswell, 73, who led the purchase last week of a site for a new museum which will also serve as an educational center and community spot.

“This is a step not just to replace the old museum,” he said. “It is a step to rebuild Paradise.”

On the one-year anniversary of the devastating Camp Fire, the museum stands at the crossroads of the region’s past and future.

Only one-fifth of the town’s population remains. Even under the most robust growth scenario, Paradise won’t reach its pre-fire population until 2030 or 2035. Instead of seven schools, there are two. More than 14,500 homes were lost; only 1,856 remain. The town’s radio station is gone.

Yet a new Paradise is emerging. Six new homes have been built, and city officials receive an average of 70 new building permit applications a month – totalling 500 by the end of the year, far more than the 200 it anticipated.

A flurry of new businesses have opened, from Nic’s Restaurant and Taco Bell to Pee Wee Preschool and Bunch Electric. The town’s electricity is working, and all power lines are being buried underground. Internet is up; so are phones. Water pipes are being replaced and roads will be resurfaced. There are plans for new bike and pedestrian paths, which will ease evacuation in an emergency.

But at the Gold Nugget Museum, it’s impossible to replace what’s gone. More than a century of Paradise Ridge history was encapsulated inside, offering the most tangible record of a place conceived as a small gold mining camp.

Its loss was an immeasurable blow to the town’s cultural memory.

“You can’t replace history,” said Randy Coy, a Chico collector who lost about 100 vintage toys on loan to the museum.

On the morning of the fire, Coy was working at the museum, installing a Christmas display of toys donated from his and a friend’s collection.

But as smoke clouds gathered overhead, he grew worried and started quickly boxing up some of his most treasured items. Using white rags left in the back of his truck, he wrapped up each item, ranging from 1920s-era Marx trucks and trains to Disney toy characters from the 1950s.

“I thought I was overreacting. I was methodical and moving fast, trying to pick the better stuff, but missed a lot,” he said.

Rushing to safety, he left behind a toy fire engine, a beloved 1955 Christmas gift to Coy when he was four years old. Perched on a top shelf, the engine could only be reached with a nine-foot ladder.

Within an hour, the museum’s wooden structure and its eight outbuildings were consumed by flames.

There’s no surviving inventory of the collection; that list, saved in a computer and external hard drive on the property, is gone. From memory, the museum’s staff and volunteers have pieced together a list of artifacts of the museum, founded in 1973 to commemorate the town’s prospecting past.

The staff mourns the loss of a Civil War-era percussion cap musket rifle, as well as a large leather bag that carried the gun’s cartridge boxes, labeled with “SNY” brass plate, signifying the 7th New York volunteer infantry.

Also gone is a 1890 Marysville saddle, daguerreotype and tintype photographs, a 1909 Brush Runabout automobile and a research library with bound newspapers.

Almost all of the adjacent structures, including a mining cabin, were destroyed. Only five of the museum’s 15 board members remain; the rest were forced to move away. One of the museum’s docents, storyteller and historian John Sedwick, died at home during the fire.

“The museum lost 98 percent of the collection. The heat and velocity of the fire left very little,” said Georgia Fox, professor of Museum Studies and chair of the Department of Anthropology at CSU Chico. “Even the metal filing cabinets — there was nothing left inside.”

On a cold and damp weekend in February, museum staff and a team of experts from CSU Chico’s anthropology and archeology departments led an effort to scour the site for anything worth saving. The once-formidable nugget looked like a soggy loaf of bread. They found pottery shards, melted metal typewriters, some mining equipment and bits and body parts of ceramic dolls.

“Just the doll heads,” recalled Fox. “It was so eerie — faces in the ash, looking up, with glassy eyes.”

In the ashes near the museum, they found metal logging equipment and Native American grinding stones, darts and other stone hunting tools. On the site of a replica gold mine, said CSU Chico anthropologist Carly Whelan, they recovered a metal shovel handle.

They couldn’t find the historic musket, but spotted its metal barrel. “Just a piece of pipe,” said Criswell.

They also discovered a charred button belonging to the coat of Luther “Yellowstone” Kelly, a celebrated soldier, hunter, trapper, scout and friend of President Theodore Roosevelt who fell in love with Paradise in 1915, settling there until his death.

The museum has reopened temporarily in the nearby Paradise train depot as it looks to rebuild.

Local history museums play an outsized role in the nation’s civic memory, said Alicia Goehring of the California Historical Society in San Francisco.

“They are every bit as important as state and national history museums,” she said. “One reason is accessibility; we can’t all go to Sacramento or Washington D.C. Secondly, they help people understand the history all around them, every day, everywhere you look. And only when you see history through the eyes of local people do you understand that experience.”

They seem immortal, with a mission to forever preserve and protect their collections.

“We were the conservators. We were the repositories,” said Criswell, whose family settled on Paradise Ridge in the 1920s and ’30s. “History matters here. Our streets are named after people. Not numbers. Not alphabetic letters.”

But while major urban museums in San Francisco and Los Angeles can invest in lavish protections, the state’s local museums lack the funding to digitize and safeguard their treasures, said CSU Chico’s Fox. While there are small federal grants, she said, “the resources are few and the needs are great.”

As the Getty Fire bore down on Los Angeles earlier this month, for instance, the $1 billion Getty Museum complex had no need to evacuate its treasures. Fire-resistant travertine stone lines its exterior walls, and its roof is covered by crushed stone. A recycled air system protects against smoke. Locked doors seal every gallery. There’s a nearby 1 million-gallon water tank for firefighting.

“We were wood and plaster. Doomed,” said Criswell.

The new museum — a fire-resistant metal building with large bay doors — will be a very different place, say museum leaders. On the site of a former automotive repair shop, it is twice as large as the old museum, with 2.3 acres.

To be sure, the museum’s popular school program will be rebuilt. So will the “Living History Center,” with live presentations. Staff wants to start another research library. Already gifts to rebuild the collection have been donated, such as an old photo of the Sterling City and Black Diamond mines and a beautiful red and black brocade dress, once worn by a celebratory Gold Nugget Day Queen.

But the new museum aspires to be more than a repository and educational center. It seeks to provide a place where the community can gather, collaborating with other organizations in events that combine history, art and performance, said Criswell.

And there will be a new display, featuring the most tragic chapter in Paradise history. An exhibit about the Camp Fire — its cause and consequences — will be offered, said museum operations manager Michelle Rader. Designed with local Fire Safe Councils, it will include information about fire prevention.

Also featured will be a memorial, likely including some of the white wooden crosses from the collection that stood for months near the entrance of town, poignant reminders of lives lost. These plywood crosses, weathered and dilapidated, are now in the museum’s storage.

“Fire is an important part of our history now,” said Rader. “It’s a big part of our history — but it’s not the only thing.”

Do you have any Paradise Ridge artifacts or photos in your home? The new museum seeks loans, gifts and financial contributions. Go to: http://www.goldnuggetmuseum.com.

Lisa M. Krieger is a science writer at The Mercury News, covering research, scientific policy and environmental news from Stanford University, the University of California, NASA-Ames, U.S. Geological Survey and other Bay Area-based research facilities. Lisa also contributes to the Videography team. She graduated from Duke University with a degree in biology. Outside of work, she enjoys photography, backpacking, swimming and bird-watching.